Garden Exhibit Honors Artist Who Poured Soul Into Clay

LEESBURG -- Ceramic artist Alice Heystek disliked showing her work in galleries. She had no taste for the opening-night crush, when it was impossible to have more than snippets of conversation.

Although she welcomed sales during the run of an exhibit, she missed meeting the people who bought the pieces she poured her soul into.

So in her last decades, the artist who had exhibited in Africa, Europe and the United States had her own shows in her garden.

To honor Heystek, who died in April at 78, her daughter, Deborah Heystek of Merritt Island, scheduled a retrospective of her life's work Saturday evening in Heystek's Leesburg garden.

Neither Alice Heystek, nor her husband, Hendrik, who died in December, had a funeral or memorial service, according to her daughter.

"This is the only kind of thing she would have tolerated," she said.

Her daughter assembled 44 pieces of Heystek's work from private collections. She found a piece from Heystek's early days, just after she graduated from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.

Alice Heystek, who was born in Albany, credited her education alongside students of ceramics engineering and technology for her understanding of clays and glazes.

A good thing, too, because Heystek married and moved to South Africa with Hendrik Heystek, a ceramics engineer. There she had to dig her own clay and make her own glazes from available raw materials.

"Unlike a painter, whose materials don't vary, when a clay artist moves, everything changes," Deborah Heystek said. "She had to re-create herself, relearn how the clay or kiln behaved and work with new glazes every time she moved."

Alice Heystek came to prominence in South Africa, where she was also known for creating walls of large slabs of brick she carved before they were fired.

Photographs of that and her other work appeared in the 1972 and 1974 books International Ceramics and New Ceramics. Two pieces in Saturday's exhibit were the ottoman-sized pots Heystek exhibited in the 1972 International Academy of Ceramics Exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, when she was invited to represent South Africa.

More recently, limited by a smaller kiln she kept in her garage, she made more manageable pieces such as plates and platters, vases and bowls. But all through her life, she continued to make what she called her "pebbles."

Like stone pebbles that are gently shaped by the waters of a stream, Heystek's versions pleased both the hand and the eye.

"Whenever my pots become too complicated or pretentious, I try to remember the pebble and its quiet, beautiful simplicity," she told the Orlando Sentinel in 2000. "It's like getting back to basics."

Her 2001 garden exhibit served as a photo shoot for an article she wrote for Ceramics Monthly, in which she described the pleasure she took from showing at home and explained how other artists could follow suit.

"For a few days in my garden, I view my work through other people's eyes," she said. "I wind up learning a lot."